


Terminal Velocity

by TheBabbleRabble



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Agender Asari Character, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Kidnapping, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Geth, POV Original Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-04-15 07:24:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4597971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBabbleRabble/pseuds/TheBabbleRabble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The crew of the Bluestorm are a small and successful “requisitions” team, living simple lives and taking simple jobs. Until they take the job to raid a Cerberus research facility and recover a mysterious experiment. Everything goes to hell soon after, and keeps getting worse and worse for the crew.</p>
<p>At the same time, a young woman tries to sell information and ends up in a sticky situation on Omega—and then a digital ghost downloads himself into her brain, or near enough. As bad as things seem, everything can still get worse. When all’s said and done, someone still has to stop the Reapers.<br/>Featuring: Well-meaning mercenaries, less well-meaning mercenaries, genetic experiments, environmental activists, digital ghosts and pissed-off hosts, corporate intrigue, geth/rachni relations, and more explosions than anyone really wanted. Oh, and the first human Spectre.<br/>(Mass Effect 2 AU elsewhere story, disregards most of Mass Effect 3)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Something about Hell and Handbaskets

**Author's Note:**

> Slight warning for kidnapping and mentions of slavery at the end of this chapter, but it's probably very toned down from what we see in canon.

It was supposed to be a relatively simple job, nothing they hadn’t done before. Land on the Cerberus moon-base, assess the situation there, possibly kill or capture everyone inside, and retrieve their experiment. Akili and her team were the go-to mercenaries for these jobs, second only to that human Spectre who may or may not have died and been resurrected. People brought in the Spectre when they wanted the long, unregulated arm of the law. They brought in the _Bluestorm_ when they wanted something done quietly and without alerting the humans.

Of course, humans had contracted the _Bluestorm_ , too, for much the same reasons: Take care of this without letting our alien allies know it was ever a problem in the first place. They had years of experience dealing with this kind of bullshit—not always Cerberus, but one racist extremist faction was the same as any other. The salarians, the asari, even the turians all had their own, and were all embarrassed by them.

The job at Delta-Alpha Base should have been the same old thing Akili had always done, and it was. Up to a point.

“This looks like the lab,” Pallas said over the team comm., the turian standing near the reinforced doors and firing indiscriminately into a crowd of guards with her machinegun. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief; they’d been fighting over two hours now through residential and office wings. “BB, think you can get it open?”

“Sure can,” said the salarian from behind Akili, on the opposite side of the room from Pallas. He popped out to spray flames over an approaching guard, and ducked back behind the drell’s superior shields.

Akili, blue light flaring down her arms, punched through another guard’s chest on her way over from one door to the next. She wasn’t worried about getting hit by Pallas’ bullets: The modified machinegun—which Pallas called The Shitkicker—had an IFF-recognition subroutine in addition to auto-targeting. It worked well enough to keep her allies safe from the bullet hail.

Halfway to Pallas, Akili and BB paused. Another wave of blue light, and she’d locked the three Cerberus guards on the left into stasis. Akili unfolded her shotgun and blew each one’s head off in rapid succession, BB providing literal covering fire against the other side of the room.

 _“You almost done in there?”_ their asari pilot said over the comm. They’d been left guarding the ship, as usual, and weren’t happy about it. As usual. BB threw a grenade to the far right wall; between the explosion and Pallas’s machinegun, they cleared that side of the room. Akili lunged forward to take on the last man standing, who’d been closing on Pallas’s position. _“I’m getting a bad feeling.”_

“Yeah, babe, you say that every time,” Pallas called back as Akili and BB reached her side and the room went more-or-less quiet. “BB’s about to break the door to the lab, and I think—yeah, Akili just kicked the head off the last guard out here, so we’re almost clear unless there’s more trouble inside.”

_“Goddess, there probably is.”_

The door slid open, and Pallas spun to take out any surprise attackers inside. The room was empty of lifesigns and Akili breathed a sigh of relief, flicking gore off her hands and feet as she stepped through. BB closed the door behind them.

“Objective should be in here, if that intelligence is right,” Akili said, pulling her helmet off for a breath of fresh air. Thing was, they hadn’t been told what this particular lab was doing, and they’d been too busy shooting people to hack any of the computers. Akili didn’t like it, but it got them paid.

_“Scanners say there’s something chewing up a lot of power on the western wall.”_

“Thanks, sweetheart,” said BB, and then paused. “Aren’t you supposed to be guarding the ship?”

_“I’m multitasking.”_

BB started scanning with his omnitool, narrowing in on a panel in the wall. It slid open to reveal a cryochamber, the glass too frosted-over to see more than a vague shape within.

“Objective sighted,” BB said. “Wonder what the Migrant Fleet wants with a lifeform in deep-freeze?”

Akili frowned and said, “Person or animal?” If it was a person, that changed the whole mission. She hoped it ended up being an animal. Animals were easier, on a moral level, though not always on a literal one. Perfect recall was wonderful, but not when it meant remembering in great detail the exact odor of varren shit.

Pallas shrugged and gave Akili a slap on the back. “Guess we’ll find out. Akili, do the honors?”

Since she was the most melee-capable of their landing team, Akili often had the fun and exciting job of opening anything that might contain hostile lifeforms. She sighed, shook her head, and pressed the green button on the cryochamber’s control panel. Sometimes she hated her job.

As the chamber opened and two large, cold hands wrapped around her throat, the owner pressing forward faster than anything coming out of cryo should—Akili decided this was one of those times.

Her back hit the opposite wall with a crunch of armored plating. Her head bounced back against the cement, vision fuzzing out for a moment.

“Shit, is this how you greet all your rescuers?”

 

When the warmth hit him, Caalo’Xaall knew they were going to start the experiments again. This time, he was ready. They’d built him to fight, after all, and now they were going to regret it. He shot out of the cryochamber hands-first.

Caalo felt the vibrations down his arms before he registered the voice, or the person he was choking against the wall. Smooth teal scales, a few shocks of bright purple, and wide dark eyes. Not Cerberus, then, unless she was another test subject.

“Shit,” said the drell woman, voice rasping and bloodstained gauntlets clutching at his wrists. If his skin weren’t so tough, the artificial claws on her gauntlets would have cut into him. As it were, they just raised pale welts across his mauve skin. “Is this how you greet all your rescuers? Pallas, don’t shoot.”

The turian behind them didn’t lower her machine gun, but did take her finger off the trigger. “Whoever you are, you ought to let go of Akili before I change my mind about rescuing you.”

“A rescue?” Caalo croaked, swinging his head between the turian and the drell. His hands loosened but didn’t let go. Were they lying to him? No. This couldn’t be another Cerberus trick. It wasn’t their style.

“Yeah, asshole,” said the drell. Her armored foot—also bloodstained—tapped against his knee. “A rescue. We killed all the Cerberus fuckers here. Put me down?”

He tried not to drop her, but his muscles weren’t quite responding the way he wanted. She landed awkwardly on her feet and slid down the wall to sit, catching her breath. Her armor, despite being melee-grade heavy on most parts of her body, didn’t cover her neck as well as it should have, especially without her helmet. Or maybe the gene mods had worked too well. He hoped it was the first case and not the second.

“Sorry.” Caalo bent to offer her a hand, but she waved him off.

“Nah,” said the drell, standing. She ran a hand over her scalp. “If I’d come out of deepfreeze in a Cerberus base, I’d probably try to choke someone out, too. I’m Akili Thanos, that’s Pallas Eudogius and Benirn Bumal. We’re Bluestorm Requisitions, and the Migrant Fleet hired us to recover whatever was being worked on, here. Guess that’d be you.”

“Scans indicate subject is quarian,” said the short reddish salarian called Benirn. He glanced up at Caalo and then back at his omnitool. “Strange. No sign of sickness or infection. Should be setting in now, without environmental suit.”

Caalo shrugged, self-conscious. “Yeah. Guess that’s what the experiments were for. Caalo’Xaall nar Vaeren, by the way. Uh. Are you going to point that at me the whole way?”

Pallas’s gun stayed unwaveringly pointed at his chest. He could take a beating, probably even a bullet, but a machinegun like that would rip him apart. “Probably not. You don’t seem like you’ll snap and try to kill anyone again, but I think we should have our asari take a peek in your head for any implanted conditioning.” While she phrased it like a suggestion, her tone made it sound more like an order.

Akili pushed forward, toward the door. “Let’s just get back to the ship before our pilot decides to fly off without us.”

 

The _Bluestorm_ wasn’t anything special as far as ships go. A corvette of turian make, dull gray with the name painted across one side in turian blood blue. Two decks: the single washroom, three bedrooms, control center and main airlock, and cockpit on the upper; a cargo bay, galley merging into lounge, engine room, and the other airlocks in the lower. More space than the four of them needed, really. Pallas had come with the ship, or the ship had come with Pallas, though she wasn’t its pilot these days. Back then, it had been called the _Albasis_. If Akili looked closely, she could still see where the previous names had been painted over. If she focused, she could call up the mental images, still as clear as reality in her mind, of the ship in all its iterations, from _Albasis_ to now.

“Finally,” their pilot snarled as the group ascended the ramp into the main airlock. “Thought you’d never get done in there.”

“Say that every time,” said BB, brushing past the dark blue asari and through the command center on his way to remove his gear. “Have a guest.”

“I see that.”

Akili snickered as Caalo’Xaall shrank under the pilot’s glare, looking oddly small before the short asari. He was taller and broader than them, though not outside a quarian’s natural body shape, as far as Akili knew. He had dark mauve skin and large eyes which were dominated mainly by pale irises, his pupils small relative to the size of his eyes. When he spoke, Akili could see a prominent fang sticking down from the left side of his mouth. She was learning all kinds of things about quarian physiology today, though she wondered how much of it was his own, and how much had been forced on him by Cerberus.

Pallas’s voice cut in, “He’s the cargo. We need you to check his head out, make sure there’s nothing nasty lurking about in there.”

The pilot rolled their eyes and said, “Sure. Fine. I’m a party trick.”

“Thanks, darling.” Then Pallas followed BB to shower and rest in the crew quarters at the backend of the ship’s upper deck. Akili remained, ducking into the cockpit to start the takeoff protocols. Blood smeared over the buttons, something Pallas would groan about later. The pilot never seemed to mind.

When she reemerged from the cockpit, the pilot’s eyes were fading back out of black and Caalo’Xaall looked like he’d been hit over the head.

“Well,” said the pilot, “there doesn’t seem to be any programming or brainwashing hidden in here.” They rapped their knuckles on his forehead. “We’re safe to launch.”

Akili grinned. “Get flying, pilot.”

 

///

 

Bones woke up stomach-down on a grungy operating table, in a grungier medbay. Her head throbbed so hard she could barely think. Couldn’t scream—they’d jabbed her in the neck with something that made her vocal chords raw and unusable, among other negative effects. Not that screaming would help, right now. Were the lights flickering, or was that her eyesight blacking out?

She thought maybe she was still on Omega, but couldn’t be certain. There wasn’t much of a view from her position, though she could see the batarian surgeon approaching to implant the slave chip. It likely wouldn’t take the way it was supposed to, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. For all Bones knew, she could get her brain fried.

 _Should have listened to Eudora,_ she thought, bile rising in her throat as she remembered how her big sister had objected to this venture. Still, the information Bones had stolen could get good money in some parts of the galaxy. Money their family needed. Money her niece, sick with T’scaris Syndrome, needed. Too bad someone found her out, or her contact sold her out, because here she was kidnapped by batarian slavers. If she got out of this, she’d have to track down her contact and—do something. Ruin his life. Flood his computers with terabytes of virus-laden and poorly-filmed porn.

Bones didn’t think she’d be getting out of this.

Oh, goddamn, they hadn’t even had the decency to anaesthetize her. She felt the sting of the scalpel at the base of her skull and then the chip was in. It hurt worse than when she’d gotten hit by that car at age twelve. A burning sensation flooded down her spine and into her limbs, collecting at the small of her back and in the bones of her hands. The burning turned to an acid ache when the batarian stuck the programming stick in to finish setting the chip. If she could have, she would have screamed.

Someone else was screaming for her.

The batarian. The batarian was screaming as the metal implant of his omnitool glowed red, the program still open on its holographic screen and the programming stick still attached to her chip—shit, oh shit she was going to die here on this table because he was having an equipment malfunction.

His wrist melted.

A voice cried loud in her mind: _[Run, now!]_

She didn’t question it, just rolled herself off the table and took off.

_[Left through the next door, get to a shuttle. We’re not that far from Omega yet.]_

Well, that answered one question. She took the next left, pushed her way past two startled guards, and hurtled down the hallway. Her right hand came up to block retaliation, however ineffectively, and she saw an unfamiliar program open on her omnitool.

The guards’ guns overheated in their hands.

That was new.

_[The shuttle’s up ahead. Interface with the control panel, and let me take care of the rest.]_

A shuttle door was swinging open. Bones dove through, rolled across the floor and had her hands and more importantly her omnitool on the control panel in seconds. Only a moment later, the door locked down and the controls whirred to life, glowing beneath her fingers as she felt the shuttle detach from the main ship and make a U-turn.

_[That went well.]_

“Okay,” Bones croaked out, her vocal chords suffering from the drugs and the dead sprint to safety. “Who the fuck are you?”

A hologram emerged from her omnitool’s projector, life-size and rendered in orange, of an armored humanoid with three fingers on each hand and backwards-bowed lower legs. His hair was pulled tightly back from his face, on which he wore an expression of amusement which showed a pointed snaggletooth. His nose was flat and his eyes were larger than the human or asari standard, with small pupils and large irises. Bones had no idea what species he was, and what he said next didn’t explain anything.

 _[My name is Jul’Voris,]_ he said, _[and I’m a ghost.]_


	2. The Handbasket is Made of Barbed Wire

“What does the Migrant Fleet even want with you?” Akili asked Caalo the next day, while they were eating lunch in _Bluestorm_ ’s small galley. Caalo thought her curiosity was coming out a little late, as it had been nearly a full galactic standard day since they left Delta-Alpha base behind. The pilot had sent a message to their employer in the Fleet early that morning, and they were still waiting to learn the Fleet’s location.

Caalo shrugged and finished chewing. “I don’t know. I was on Pilgrimage when all of…this happened." He waved a hand, trying to explain himself without having to say anything about his year in captivity. "I haven’t been back to the Fleet in years. It’s possible my family found out where I was.” Privately, he thought it unlikely that the Fleet would go through so much trouble for his sake. Quarians on Pilgrimage either found their own way or didn’t.

“Maybe,” said Pallas, voice muffled as she dug through the cupboards for something, “they want to use you like a vaccine. Since you don't get sick anymore.” Caalo winced, but couldn’t voice his discomfort before BB started talking.

“Makes sense,” he said, more to himself than anyone. “Migrant Fleet trades information. May have heard of Cerberus experiment and wanted to use your DNA to bolster weak quarian immune system.” He turned to address Caalo: “You are a medical miracle.”

Caalo thought maybe it was a compliment. He grimaced anyway, and said, “I’m not interested in being anyone’s science experiment anymore. Even my own people’s.”

The pilot, leaning against the counter while waiting for tea to steep, said in a flat, careful tone, “They paid us half upfront. Akili?”

“Yeah, sweetie, I know.” She sat forward and rested her chin on her fist. “I’m not much in the mood to turn to sentient trafficking, which is what this is starting to feel like. If we assume they knew the cargo was a person, it…says a lot of worrying things, first and foremost being why they didn’t tell us we were on a rescue mission. Unless it wasn’t supposed to _be_ a rescue. I’d like to assume they didn’t know what the cargo was and just wanted it liberated from Cerberus, but that’s not much better.”

“Their intel was good.” That came from Pallas, now with her…was that a levo-dextro sandwich? The cheese looked like a human brand, but the meat was the pale bluish color of alaptera. He’d heard of people mixing food from both amino groups, but hadn’t actually seen it before. She didn’t seem to be succumbing to anaphylaxis, at least. “We found the base where they said we would, and we found the cargo there. At least, what we’re assuming the cargo was.”

“I’m not a piece of meat,” Caalo sputtered. While he knew it was a quirk of vernacular, he still itched at the impersonal language. It hit too close to _specimen_ and _subject_. “I’m a person.”

Akili nodded, but Caalo got the feeling she didn’t quite understand what he was trying to say. “If you were an animal, this would be much less trouble. Look, I’m not saying we hand you over so the Migrant Fleet can just continue what Cerberus was doing. But we don’t know that’s what they’re going to do. I say we meet at the rendezvous point, we get the rest of our pay, and then we, I dunno, find out what their intentions are. If it’s a genuine rescue, then hooray. If it’s morally unsound, we blast the hell out of there with you. I don’t generally like to think badly of the Migrant Fleet, but—”

“It might not actually be the Migrant Fleet,” the pilot broke in. “The ID codes match, but those aren’t hard to fake and we’re not exactly packing state of the art equipment here.”

“Hey,” said Pallas, with a bland, perfunctory protectiveness Caalo couldn’t parse. An in-joke, maybe?

“And,” the pilot went on as those she hadn’t spoken, “we never saw their faces. Voice modifiers go for cheap these days. We were lazy this time, didn’t check out sources like we should have. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe we’re being tricked.”

Akili pushed back from the table. “Alright. So we contact Sragi.”

 

“Who’s Sragi?” Caalo asked. Akili had almost forgotten he was there, even though he was the topic of conversation. Rude of her, but it had been ages since she’d spent any significant amount of time with someone other than her crew.

“Kedrax Sragi, she’s our…” Akili trailed off, trying to put what Sragi did into civilian terms instead of mercenary ones. Terms that didn’t make her sound bad. Her team beat her to the punch.

“Hacker,” said BB, at the same time Pallas said, “Information broker.”

Caalo didn’t look any more enlightened than before. The pilot fell into the chair next to him with their tea, and leaned over to access the kitchen’s console. They put the call through to Sragi, on Tuchanka.

 _“Hello, love,”_ the krogan said, appearing in the blue hologram. She was distracted by something off-screen, probably one of her many projects. _“I don’t have any jobs for you yet, sorry.”_

“Actually, Sragi,” said the pilot, with a pause to sip at their tea, “we were hoping you could do a check for us.”

 _“Yeah, sure. What do you need?”_ Before the pilot could explain, Sragi pinned her focus on someone behind her, out of the camera’s range. _“Be careful with that! You want clean water or not? Because you’re not going to get it if you break the damn water purifiers I spent four months saving up to buy!”_ She turned back to the camera with a roll of her eyes and a muttered _men_. _“Sorry about that. What can I do for you, hon?”_

“We got a job, but now we’re not so sure about our employers. Said they were with the Migrant Fleet, but now things aren’t adding up.  Or they’re adding up in ways we’re not too happy about. If it’s them, we need to know what their intentions were because otherwise someone in the Fleet might be starting up a trafficking ring. If it’s not, well, that’s very bad news for us.”

Sragi paused and turned her eyes on Akili. _“You got a job without running it by me? Akili, don’t you remember what happened last time?”_

Akili remembered it perfectly, and had to shake her head to brush away the sudden, too-real images that leapt to mind. That—well, that had been a trip in the worst kind of way. “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal this time.”

 _“Look, it’s too easy for people to fool your ship’s systems.”_ Right on cue, Akili heard Pallas’s token _hey_ , not really insulted but obliged to pretend at it. _“If you’re gonna insist on taking jobs the way you do, avoiding the official bounty boards, you need to let me screen them. How else am I supposed to earn my pay?”_ Sragi sighed and waved one blunt hand. _“Just send me the data, I’ll get back to you.”_

As the pilot queued up the data, the console pinged with a message. Akili transferred the message to her omnitool rather than close out Sragi. A quick skim had her cursing her way through three stanzas of turian battle poetry. “It’s our mysterious fucking employers, with a time and location to meet them for the pickup. Of, y’know, the fucking sentient being.”

 _“Well, stall them,”_ was Sragi’s exasperated advice.

“Or,” suggested Pallas around a bite of her sandwich, “we could go with Akili’s original plan.”

Caalo broke in, “Can I just state for the record that I don’t really like that plan?” When Akili opened her mouth to protest in favor of her very simple and effective plan, he added, “It involves me being bait for people with unknown intentions. For all we know, they could be another Cerberus cell, and I’d really prefer to avoid dealing with that.”

_“Yeah, hold off on that for the moment. Until we know more about what you’ll be walking into. Akili, sweetie, I love you, but intel exists for a reason.”_

BB scrambled over to the console and snapped off a message before Akili could say anything to that. “Told them ship took unforeseen damage in assault on Delta-Alpha. Landing for repairs and will meet when done.”

Akili let out a long, slow breath. More than his talent with grenades and flamethrowers, his ability to come up with convincing lies had earned BB a spot on the crew. Well, that and his medical skills. “Thank you, BB. That should hold them off for a day or two. Sragi, get us that intel, and I’ll give you double your usual cut.”

 _“I’ll have it by tomorrow.”_ On her end, Sragi was already more focused on her screens and keyboards than the camera, and winked out without waiting for a goodbye. Typical of her, always consumed either in her hacking or her environmental work. After this mess was over, they’d have to take some time off to visit her.

First, they had to take care of the mess, though.

///

_[My name is Jul’Voris, and I’m a ghost.]_

“You’re going to need to give me more than that,” Bones said, massaging her hands. The cybernetic bones and muscles there had taken the brunt of the beating from the failed slave-chip implantation. Or mostly failed, since the chip was actually in her skull, just not programmed. Her few cybernetic vertebrae, low in her spine, ached as if to remind her of their existence. Most days, she could forget about them. Other than her right eye, all her cybernetics were internal and relatively minor compared to what most people needed. “Like why you were in my brain, for instance, and how you took over my omnitool.”

 _[The first part was an accident. I was trying to shut down the slave-chip programmer. Your…augmentations are not something I have much experience with.]_ The strange alien hologram shrugged. His Galactic had an accent, familiar but off somehow. A memory that didn’t match up.

“Okay, you’re a weird hologram thing, you don’t get to be twitchy around cyborgs.” If she was stuck with an anti-cyborg ghost, of all things, she’d probably scream. As soon as her vocal chords stopped feeling like shit and she could manage above a low murmur.

 _[I’m not a “weird hologram thing,” I’m a ghost.]_ He gave a short, sharp sigh. _[I really don’t know why that happened. You don’t have any cybernetics in your brain, aside from the connections for your eye, and now the chip. The chip isn’t sophisticated enough to hold so much data, and your augmentations shouldn’t be, either. Whatever happened, it’s…unprecedented.]_

Bones sighed, too, and gave up on trying to soothe away the leftover pain. “Thank you, by the way. I wouldn’t have made it out of there without you.”

_[Just doing my job.]_

“Ghosts have jobs now?”

 _[I used to be a Spectre. There’s not much else for me to do now, so I might as well keep doing what I was doing before.]_ The shuttle jolted as it began the landing sequence at one of Omega’s docks. Jul’Voris was silent for a long moment, but then said, _[They were targeting you, specifically, and I’d like to know why.]_

So it was a setup, right from the start. She should have known better. A few years of teenage rebellion in Nos Astra’s back alleys hadn’t made her very good at being a criminal. Half her mind occupied itself with planning how to get back at her contact—would he fall for the old “virus in the email link” trick? Maybe if the email came from a spoofed porn site. “Because I was trying to sell information on Daniel Garret.”

_[Head of Garrote Solutions? Ambitious, I’ll give you that. You do know what they do, right?]_

“Of course I know what they do. I’ve been the assistant director of their clerical department for two years. That’s how I found the information, in the first place.” She pursed her lips. “I don’t know how Garret figured it out. He’s been incommunicado in his top-secret villa for like three months.” The dock sent an all-clear signal, and the shuttle set down in the open space. As the door opened and the ramp extended, the hologram of Jul’Voris winked out.

 _[You should get off Omega as soon as possible,]_ he said into her brain, which was just as trippy as the first time around. _[They’ll likely try again.]_

“And you’re, what, just sticking around?” Bones said aloud, ignoring the odd looks she got. She was an absolute mess and still had an open wound on the back of her head. If talking to herself was what got her the odd looks, these people needed to rearrange their priorities.

_[I don’t like to leave a job half-finished. I’ll make sure you get home safe.]_

It felt as though a ghostly hand passed through Bones’ chest, not an uncomfortable sensation but an unfamiliar one. She couldn’t quite match it to an emotion, but she thought perhaps gratitude. It had been a while since Bones had anyone on whom to rely. Even Eudora, her elder sister, tended to lean on Bones more than Bones leaned on her.

“Thanks.” Omega smelled just like she remembered, and nothing like her and her sister’s apartment in Nos Astra. Bones pulled up a map on her omnitool, as well as travel information for the station’s outbound ships. It was high time she left this disgusting rock, and got back to her family. If she had a Spectre leaning over her shoulder, all the better. With luck, she could put this incident behind her and go back to her quiet little job.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> short chapter to get the plot moving. sorry for the wait! college is stress.


	3. And Also Full of Grenades

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arguments, new friends (?), and conversations

It was early in the ship’s morning cycle when Akili woke to a beeping from her omnitool. Sragi was calling, and whatever it was about was important enough for her to connect straight to Akili rather than the ship. She barely had time to get out a “hello” before their hacker launched into furious explanation.

_“Listen, it’s Cerberus. Do you hear me? You were contracted by Cerberus, as in the main body of Cerberus, the chief, the big guns, to take out the Delta-Alpha cell. You’re in deep shit. This isn’t good at all. You can’t go to that rendezvous, you’ll get blown out of the sky.”_

Akili scratched at her purple neck frills and yawned out a, “Shit.” On her bunk across from Akili’s, Pallas slept straight through Sragi’s tirade.

_“Yes! Exactly! This is why you don’t take jobs without checking with me!”_

It was way too early for her to figure out a plan of action. Akili supposed they could just go with her original plan. Though, Cerberus ships had more firepower than the _Bluestorm_ would ever have. Running was probably better. Disappear, rename the ship, and take up a new job with Sragi’s thorough approval. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d done it. Maybe this time, Pallas would get her wish and they’d rename the ship _Starfucker_.

Probably not. The pilot always vetoed that suggestion.

_“Akili?”_ Sragi said, and she realized she’d dozed off. _“Akili, are you listening to me? We need to do something. Now.”_

She pushed herself up and out of bed, running a hand down her face. “Yeah, yeah, I hear you. We’ll. Hell. We’ll change the ID codes, the IFF, name, everything. Sragi, send the alert message to our repeat clients. Cerberus doesn’t know us, personally, they know the Bluestorm name, is all. We can just go to ground.”

_“That is clever,”_ said a voice through her omnitool. It definitely wasn’t Sragi, and the jolt of surprise had Akili wide awake in half a second.

“Who the fuck are you!” Akili snapped, and saw Pallas shoot upright on her cot.

_“We are Oracle, platform of the geth.”_

_“I’m sorry, I don’t know what they’re doing!”_ Sragi broke in, sounding even more frantic than she had before. _“Or how they’re doing it!”_

_“We are not a threat,”_ the geth said, voice mechanical and reverberating. Pallas’s mandible plates flared—she hated problems she couldn’t shoot. _“We want to help.”_

Akili took a deep breath and tried to remind herself this wasn’t the weirdest thing that had happened to her. “Assuming you are telling the truth— _assuming!_ ” she shouted over Pallas’s rising snarl. “What exactly are you going to do? And why help us, of all people in the galaxy?”

_“We have tracked your team for months through the extranet. A drell, a turian, a salarian, an asari, and a krogan.”_ So, they didn’t know about Caalo. Good, their information wasn’t up-to-date, which meant they didn’t have any bugs on the ship. _“We want to learn about organics. Bluestorm crew provides the best variety and opportunity. Meet us on Ilium. We are waiting, if you accept.”_ The channel cut out before Akili could respond.

Caalo didn’t think he’d wake up to arguing, but there it was. He followed the sounds from the ship’s guest cabin across the hall to the room Akili and Pallas shared. The whole crew was jammed into the small space, even Sragi’s face in hologram from Akili’s omnitool. All of them were still in pajamas—except Pallas, who apparently slept naked. She couldn’t have been awake long before the argument began, as she had yet to reapply her face paint, the two vertical slashes of pale green from forehead to jaw.

“You can’t be serious!” the pilot was yelling at Akili as Caalo stepped into the room. The sleeves of their sleep robes billowed along with their harsh, angry gestures. “Pallas, tell me she’s not serious.”

“No thanks,” said Pallas, who had taken herself out of the argument. She was sitting on her cot, sketching.

“High probability of failure,” said BB, arms crossed over his thin chest, normally red-brushed face gone fish-pale. Caalo didn’t know if that was a sign of anger or fear in salarians, but was willing to bet the latter. “Not a reasonable undertaking.”

Akili, standing at the center of the room in loose sleep-pants, ran a hand down her face and onto her flat chest. She looked tired and annoyed, bare shoulders bowed inward and chin tipped down. She, like the rest of them, didn’t notice Caalo standing at the door. “No, of course not. But when do we ever do reasonable?”

_“We’re already in deep shit,”_ said Sragi. _“Cerberus is_ on _you. I can try to change your codes, but I’m on Tuchanka and they’re Cerberus. They’ll catch on eventually. I hate to say it, but I think Akili’s right. We need help.”_

“But geth?” the pilot shrieked. Caalo’s breath caught at the word, loud enough that Akili’s eyes flickered toward him.

“Yes,” said Akili, “geth. Who can talk, and contacted us on their own. And with Cerberus riding our ass—Caalo, that’s who hired us to find you.” Oh, that made everything so much worse. First Cerberus, then geth, then Cerberus again. “With them riding our ass, I think we need more friends than enemies.”

_“Rumor has it, that human Spectre’s been traveling with a geth platform as well,”_ Sragi added. _“Maybe the geth are going through a cultural shift. Or something. I don’t know, but the coordinates they sent for the meeting are in the middle of Nos Astra. I doubt they could be setting up an ambush there.”_

“Are you really going to make a deal with geth?” Caalo asked, voice strangled. Was this worse than knowing Cerberus was on their tail?

“Not all the geth. Just one or two platforms.” Akili made it sound so simple, but she obviously didn’t know what she was getting into. Geth could share programs between platforms, there was no separation between an individual and the collective with them. They’d be painting a target on their backs. Though, he reminded himself, they already had one there. What was one more? “Listen, we need to get out of here anyway. Let’s just go to Ilium, check it out, and if we’re all still spooked, we can just leave. Does that work for everybody?”

Pallas held up a hand, not looking away from her sketchpad, and said, “Yup.” BB nodded, crossed arms loosening until they hung by his side, while the pilot huffed grudging assent.

“Alright,” said Akili, nudging the pilot with her elbow. “Set a course for Ilium.”

The pilot turned to leave, to carry out the order, and Caalo couldn’t help asking, “What, just like that?” The pilot shrugged as they brushed past him.

Akili faced him, shoulders drooping. “Look, I know this isn’t going to be a very fun field trip for you. If you want us to drop you off somewhere, just say the word.”

For a second, he wanted to take her up on the offer. Then he stopped and thought about it: Being alone again, somewhere where he didn’t know anybody, prime target for Cerberus to swoop in and snatch up. Or making his way back to the Migrant Fleet and becoming a pincushion as they tried to spread his miracle immune system to everyone else. Caalo wanted to help his people, but being an experiment again? No thanks.

“No,” he said finally. “I’ll be fine. Can’t be worse than what I’ve already been through, right?”

Akili grinned, and clapped him on the shoulder so hard he stumbled. “That’s the spirit. Welcome to the crew.”

Well, shit. What had he just signed up for?

 

///

 

Getting a ship off Omega was as easy as Bones had hoped and easier than she thought it would be. She suspected Jul’Voris had a hand in it. How else would could she get her own cabin on the  _Ravana_ ? On her way to Omega, she’d ridden a commercial flight with uncomfortable seats and a neighbor whose head kept falling onto her shoulder as he dozed.

Her cabin on the _Ravana_ was small, but private. Bones could speak to Jul without the strange looks, at least. It didn’t have anywhere to wash up, though, so her everything was still gross. After getting off the shuttle, she’d scraped her red hair into a ponytail and tried to ignore the dried blood on her shirt. The _Ravana’s_ crew almost hadn’t let her board, in her state, but growing up on Ilium was good for something. She’d learned very early on how to carry herself like a hassled VIP with the power to make everyone’s day so much worse if they didn’t give her what she wanted. It came in handy at the office, when she needed this or that done _now_ and no, Jim, I’m not your mother, get your own damn coffee.

“How do you even exist?” she asked Jul around a bite of chicken. Or something like chicken. The ship had complimentary meals, and Bones hadn’t felt like asking exactly what she was eating, not when it was the first real food she’d had since leaving home. It was levo, and that was all she needed to know. “I mean. Hacker ghosts. That’s something out of a horror movie.” _The signal is coming from inside the station_ , she thought with a snicker.

Jul, holographic in the chair beside her, was quiet for a long moment. _[What do you know about the Geth War?]_

“Uh. Not much.” She speared a piece of dark gold vegetable on her fork. “History was never my best subject. The geth rebelled against the quarians and drove them from their homeworld, right?”

_[Something like that. The quarians practice ancestor worship. Before the war, they took personality imprints of the deceased, and made them into VIs. Over time, they tried to make them more than that: Not just a recording but a piece of the one who’d died, so they could live on. The geth destroyed the databanks, and with it almost every ancestor VI the quarians had.]_

“Almost? Wait,” Bones said, before he could object. His expression had turned stony, and she wanted to get as much information from him as she could before he shut down on her. “The geth are a truly intelligent synthetic species, but the quarians did that on accident. You said they were trying to make their ancestor VIs intelligent as well—you mean they succeeded? They actually…that’s why you’re a ghost. Because you’re the intelligent personality imprint of a dead quarian. Somehow, you survived the destruction of the databanks and got onto the extranet.”

Jul’s jaw clenched and then relaxed. _[Are you sure you’re a secretary?]_

“Don’t fuck around, man,” she said, preferring to ignore that he’d called her a secretary, which was just plain insulting. “How advanced, exactly, did they make you?” It was probably a rude question, but she was talking to an alien AI who’d survived over two hundred years on the extranet. She could forgive herself for being a nosy ass. And he, at least, seemed willing to humor her for now.

_[Comparably advanced, sentient and problem-solving, but. A lot of what I am feels like description instead of substance.]_ He pursed his lips, the expression strange around his snaggletooth. Bones made a “go on” motion.

_[I remember my favorite food was the simmu. It’s a type of fruit.]_ With a motion that seemed more for her benefit than a necessity, he queued up an image on her omnitool. It was something like an avocado, with a hard white rind and dark purple flesh. _[I don’t remember what it tastes like, just that it’s my favorite. On Rannoch, my family had a simmu tree, and my sister and I would eat it out of the rind with a spoon.]_ Jul paused and tilted his head. _[I think it’s extinct, actually.]_

He said it so wryly, Bones nearly choked on her fork. If the orange went extinct, that wasn’t the tone she’d use.

“Knowledge but not wisdom?” she asked, trying to get her mind back on track.

_[Something like that. Are you sure you’re a secretary?]_ he asked again.

“Okay, first of all, I am not a secretary, I am the assistant director of the clerical department. Secondly, what, I can’t have an interest in computer technology?” Garrote Solutions hadn’t been her first choice of employment, and certainly not in clerical work. But between her cybernetics and her niece Philomena’s worsening health, they needed a company with Alliance-standard health insurance. Too late, they realized operating on Ilium meant Garrote Solutions didn’t have to follow through on its promises. By then, Bones was bound to them for a fifteen year work contract. Clawing her way up the ladder to assistant director hadn’t helped as much as they’d hoped, the pay still too low. They’d been making ends meet, but it was always a close call.

Now, thanks to those batarians or whoever had set her up, the family was deeper in the hole. So much money went to paying for Philomena’s treatments—which GS refused to cover because they were too experimental. Because T’scaris Syndrome had only in the last twenty years made the jump from asari to human, and despite the asari’s centuries of research into a cure for their own species, anything for humans was still in the testing phase. And Bones had wasted even more on passage to and from Omega.

Bones didn’t know how things could possibly get worse.


	4. Everything Actually Goes to Hell in a Humvee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aaaand some new characters get introduced. Bones' side is heating up.

Ilium was just as Akili remembered it: Shiny and annoying. Gods, she hated Ilium. If she had to be dirtside anywhere, she preferred the Kedrax clan’s compound on Tuchanka, with its farms and water purifiers and solar panels. Sragi had done good work there. It took a lot of money and a lot of asserting her dominance, but she’d done good work.

The trip from the Terminus System to Ilium had, at least, given them the chance to scrap their IFF and ID codes and emerge anonymous. The _Star Eater_ , formerly the _Bluestorm_ , docked at Ilium without anyone being the wiser.

“Fuck the docking fees here,” Akili muttered as she stepped down the ramp, Caalo and Pallas right behind her. They’d dug up new clothes for Caalo, and almost a full set of body armor. None of them had boots that could fit over his quarian legs, but at least he had a helmet. They all figured it would be easier to fly under the radar if no one could tell they had a suit-free quarian with them. Pallas couldn’t help drawing attention, though, since the Shitkicker slung over her shoulder made grenade launchers look small even when folded up.

“I’d rather not,” said Pallas, and Akili shot her a look. “Alright, alright.”

“You know how I feel about lazy sex jokes.”

“Just couldn’t help myself.”

Akili rolled her eyes and pulled a map up on her omnitool. “Look, Oracle isn’t far from here. Let’s get this meeting over with.” The geth platform wanted to meet them at one of Nos Astra’s interior gardens in a residential sector. Nice, but not where Akili was used to meeting people. There were also far too many blind spots and ambush points in that sector for her comfort, but she still had trouble believing even one geth platform had gotten into the arcology city, let alone enough to set up an ambush.

“I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Caalo lowly, crew comm. the only reason Akili heard him over the bustle of busy streets. Crowds of businesspeople parted at the trio walked down the sidewalk. That was one thing Akili appreciated about planets like this one: The people knew how to get the fuck out of an armed mercenary’s way. Didn’t quite make up for all the flash and shininess, but it was a start.

“That’s what I always say,” said Pallas, the liar, in a purposefully flat tone, “whenever we go through with one of her plans.”

“No you don’t,” Akili said, pausing to check if it was this turn or the next. “You love my plans. You said you’d storm the Citadel if I planned the attack.”

Pallas gave a low, flanging chuckle and jerked her head as Caalo. “Don’t tell him that.”

“I, uh,” Caalo stuttered. Poor guy. These past few days—actually, likely the past few years—had been hard on him. “Sorry, but. Are you the captain?”

Akili paused again and thought it over. It was an important question, to quarians, but one she didn’t have a good answer for. “Maybe? I plan shit, Pallas kills shit, BB hacks shit, and the pilot flies shit. And Sragi finds us jobs. I don’t think we have enough of a chain of command for me to count as a captain, though.” She led them up the stairs, hoping she’d taken the right turn. The arcology skyscrapers were confusing, and she still had trouble finding her way despite her photographic memory. Another thing to hate about the place.

_Though the gardens are nice_ , she thought, as they stepped over a bridge and into lush grass. Most of the plants were Thessian in origin, willowy flowering trees and soft mauve-tinted lichen. Other things Akili didn’t recognize. Walls enclosed the garden on three sides, crowded with apartment sectors crawling toward the sky. This was far from the richest neighborhood in Nos Astra. Akili found it a refreshing change from clients and potential business partners who tried to show off with meetings in expensive restaurants and corner offices.

Now where the hell was the geth?

Her omnitool pinged with a text message: _to your left, friend thanos_. She looked over and, ah, there it was, almost camouflaged within an arrangement of blocky chrome sculptures. Actually, there they were. Two of them.

Akili gritted her teeth, hid it with a grin, and walked over.

 

There were two too many geth platforms in the garden for Caalo’s comfort. Akili, on the other hand, seemed like she was having a great time.

“So which one of you is Oracle?” she asked, sauntering up. The smaller one, with physiology similar to “hopper” type geth identified only recently, stepped forward and raised two eye-flaps. The geth’s synthetic tissue was almost black in color, and the visible metal components were matte silver.

“We are the platform designated Oracle, Friend Thanos,” the geth said, in an odd, high-pitched voice. The geth gestured awkwardly to the other, a more humanoid platform covered in dark blue armored plates and standing at attention a step behind Oracle. “This is the platform designated Centurion.”

“We are pleased to meet you, Friends Thanos and Eudogius,” said Centurion, voice surprisingly musical. Like the electro-core Caalo’s neighbor used to listen to, back on the _Vaeren_.

“Please, call me Akili.” She flashed them another grin and shook Centurion’s outstretched hand without hesitation. Either she wasn’t scared or she was very good at hiding it. Pallas, beside her, seemed utterly nonchalant even in full armor. For the tenth time that day, Caalo asked himself what he’d gotten into, signing on with people like this.

“And call me Pallas. Getting called Eudogius reminds me of the military, and I emphatically do not miss the military.” There was something in her tone, and in the twitch of Akili’s shoulders, that indicated a very long story behind the statement. “Nice to meet you both, Oracle, Centurion.”

Centurion nodded and shook her hand next. “Hello, Friend Pallas. We did not mean to remind you of the military. We will endeavor, in the future, to avoid doing so.” Centurion’s head flaps opened then closed as the geth made a low booping sound. “Should you wish to continue to reach consensus with this platform. Our runtimes indicate it would be negative, or ‘sad,’ if you do not.”

Pallas clasped her hands against her chest, a quiet purring laugh escaping her. She looked to Akili, looking like a child begging their mother for a new toy. “Akili, I want to keep them. Can we keep them?”

Akili just laughed and slung an arm around Caalo’s shoulder, dragging him into the spotlight. “And this is our newest recruit, Caalo’Xaall nar Vaeren.”

Both geth swung their heads toward him in unison, the effect unnerving. Oracle said, “It is an honor, Creator Caalo’Xaall.”

“Uh. Same to you?” It appeared to be the right thing to say, as Oracle’s long-fingered hands flapped like small, excited birds. Okay, amazing. He’d made the geth platform happy. The back of his brain shouted at him about all the traditions and taboos he was breaking, about how disappointed his parents would be in him, about how he was betraying the quarian species. But at least he’d made the geth happy.

“So, hey, before we get these negotiations started,” Pallas broke in, “do you two have any specific like…pronouns, or something?”

Oracle’s eye-flaps lifted again. “The Centurion platform has decided ‘they/them’ pronouns best describe their gestalt consciousness. This platform uses ‘ne/nem/nir’ pronouns.” Ne paused. “Our programming indicates these pronouns are ‘cute’ and therefore nonthreatening. Thank you for asking, Friend Pallas.”

“No problem.” Pallas’s voice had taken on a cooing note. Akili met Caalo’s eyes and smirked, jerking her head at the turian as if to say _can you believe this._ Caalo wasn’t sure he believed anything that was happening. Maybe he was still in cryogenic storage at Delta-Alpha, and this was all a very strange dream. He almost hoped it was, and then thought about it a bit more. No, wait, that was horrible. He preferred the geth, and the weird mercenaries.

“Now that introductions are out of the way,” said Akili, “care to explain what all of this is about?”

Oracle spoke again, obviously the leader of the pair: “The geth wish to make peace with organic society, in particular the Creators. We have come to consensus that we must first learn about organic society and encourage them to learn about us. Ten platforms were created for this purpose, each holding up to one thousand and one hundred runtimes of the geth. These platforms will not trade runtimes with the geth consensus, except to back up our memory for preservation purposes. In this way, we can come to understand individuality, which organic beings seem to prize. This platform and Centurion are the second and third to make contact with organic beings. We.” Ne stopped. “Found your crew.”

Akili nodded, but Pallas was the one to speak: “You said you’d been tracking us through the extranet?”

“Chatrooms. Blogs. Forums. Similar digital signatures, similar patterns of speech, similar behavior. Your hacker finding you jobs, or the aftermath of jobs. News stories which showed particular details, enough to know it was your crew.”

“Oracle’s programming indicates,” said Centurion, with an odd trill to their voice, “that documented exploits of crew fit behavior human English has designated ‘cool.’”

“Crew of Friend Akili is honorable and varied. They are a logical sample for our education.” Caalo could almost say Oracle sounded embarrassed. It went against his whole upbringing, but he was starting to understand Pallas’s reaction to the two geth platforms. Could it be some new form of attack? Distract organics with adorable, seemingly harmless platforms and then strike when they’d let their guard down? Oracle added, belatedly, “If Friend Akili would have us.”

Akili turned to look at Pallas and Caalo, and he jumped a little when she asked, “What do you two think?” She’d said she was only “maybe” the captain, but Caalo hadn’t realized that meant she’d factor his opinion into her decisions. Captains knew what was best for their crew, they didn’t need untested crewmembers to tell them how to run their ships.

“Oh, you already know what I think,” said Pallas, to which Akili conceded with a nod and a fond laugh. They all turned to look at Caalo. For the second time, everyone’s attention was on him, so he spoke as fast as he could to get it _off_ him.

“Okay, my species is not on the best of terms with the geth, so I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve half a mind to agree with Pallas, but the other half is telling me they’ll kill me as soon as my back is turned.”

“Alright, I appreciate the honesty.” Akili’s attention went back to the geth, her tone managing to stay friendly even as it went businesslike. “Sragi takes a commission fee for finding our jobs, that’s a set rate no matter how much we get paid—and trust me, we’ve tried to give her more. We split the rest of the pay equally, with one share set aside for ship repairs, docking fees, and other business expenses. As far as our clients and any authorities are concerned, I’m in charge. On the ground we work as a team, but if Pallas or I give an order, you damn well better listen. Any souvenirs you take off the enemy go into the crew armory, but anything you buy with your own money is yours. We all pitch in for meals. The pilot prefers not to be gendered or named. No getting drunk before a job, but getting drunk after is fine. These terms acceptable to you?”

It was the same speech she’d given him two days ago, word for word. Did she practice it in the bathroom mirror or something, just in case she had to induct new crewmembers?

“Yes,” said Oracle, as Centurion said, “Affirmative.”

“Great!”

Overhead, an apartment window exploded outward. An armored body came sailing through, as Caalo’s HUD picked up multiple hostiles closing in on the garden.

Akili grinned wild and sharp, securing her helmet over her head. “Guess you’re about to earn your pay.”

 

///

****

Bones breathed a sigh of relief as she finally reached her floor. She knew this hallway like an old friend. The family had moved to this apartment from Shanxi when she was eight. Though both her parents had long since returned to Shanxi, Bones and her elder sister Eudora had stayed. Nos Astra wasn’t perfect, and it wasn’t the end goal for either sister, but it was home. Bones could feel the tension in her shoulders loosening with each step closer to the apartment door.

The keypad looked like a varren had chewed on it.

_[Shit,]_ said Jul.

“Maybe it was just a malfunction,” said Bones, trying to breathe as she keyed in the apartment’s combination. The door cycled open, and Bones took a deep breath.

_[A malfunction that also threw your furniture across the room?]_ Okay, that wasn’t helpful at all.

Bones ignored him and stepped around the armchair nearly blocking the doorway. “Dora? Mena? I’m home! Eudora? _Eudora!_ ”

The two armchairs in the living room had been knocked over, the couch overturned, and the bookshelf knocked down. Beneath the window overlooking the public garden, the dining table sat untouched but only one of its four matching chairs was still intact. Those chairs had come with the family from Shanxi. The kitchen looked like a hurricane had blown through it, and Bones didn’t want to see what the bedrooms were like. She staggered to the dining table, righted lifted the one unbroken chair, and sank into it. This was their _home_. It had been one thing to be kidnapped off the dirty streets of Omega, but to come back to a place that should have been safe and find it like this? It was almost too much to bear.

_[Bones?]_

She looked out the window, down three stories to the garden. God, was this her fault? Was this all because of the information she tried to sell? Her sister and niece could be dead, for all she knew. All because of her.

_[Bones, look.]_ Jul’s hologram emerged from her omnitool and tapped her shoulder. It was probably some strange side-effect of him being in her brain, but she swore she could feel the contact. Startled, Bones followed where he pointed. There, on the dining table, was a tablet marked with the Garrote Solutions logo.

Oh, god.

Jul turned on the tablet. It automatically began to play a video, showing a man in his fifties, with graying blond hair. He was dressed in a suit more expensive than two months’ of her rent, sitting on a balcony overlooking a picturesque tropical rainforest.

Daniel fucking Garret.

_“Hello, Iphigenia Bones,”_ he said, polite smile in place and speaking like he was at a dinner party. _“I was very surprised to hear you’d escaped from the little trap I set for you on Omega. That’s unfortunate, because if you’d just been a good girl and followed the plan, I wouldn’t have had to take such drastic measures. Your sister and niece are now in my custody, where they will remain indefinitely. But I’m a reasonable man. Should you fork over the data you stole, Miss Bones, I might be willing to negotiate.”_ His smile went edged and wolfish for a moment, voice dropping low. _“That is, if you can survive the little surprise I’ve left for you.”_

Bones’ vision went red. “I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna find his secret goddamn summer house and burn it to the ground.”

_[You’re not going to live to do that if you don’t find cover right now! Hostiles right outside the door. Get behind the counter!]_

Bones dove behind the kitchen island just before the door cycled open again. Her left hand landed on a long, serrated steak knife, which she snatched up and held close to her chest. A pistol would have been better, but she had some training with knives. Enough, she hoped, to get her through this.

Two sets of footsteps entered the room.

_[Get ready,]_ said Jul, as a program opened on her omnitool. _[In a minute I’ll need you to break cover so I can ruin their day.]_ The footsteps came closer, moving past the kitchen island toward the large window. _[Steady…steady…now!]_

Bones rolled out on the side opposite the pair, closer to the door than the window. A turian standing a step in front of a batarian, both in full dark brown armor with blood red decal. Garrote Solutions colors, Garrote Solutions mercenaries. As they raised their guns to fire, sparks shot over their armor. Their arms froze halfway up.

_[Amazing what’s computerized, these days,]_ Jul said, a manic and breathless edge to his voice. Like he couldn’t believe that actually worked. If he’d put her life on the line for a hunch, Bones was going to find a way to strangle him, ghost or no. _[And for my final trick!]_

Something on the turian’s belt beeped—a grenade! Bones lunged toward the counter, but didn’t make it in time. The explosion threw her back, into the wall, and gave her a perfect view of the batarian getting launched backward through the window by the force of the blast. The turian went all over her living room, in little pieces.

“Warn me, next time,” Bones snapped, instead of letting out the litany of _oh god oh god oh god_ taking over her mind.

_[We need to move. There’s more on the way.]_

“Oh god.” She should have known Garret wouldn’t stop at two. What Garrote Solutions’ mercenaries lacked in finesse, they made up for in numbers. GS had never boasted about having the best, the smartest, or the most cunning: Only that they could take care of the problem quickly and cheaply. And now Bones was the problem.

_[Bones,]_ Jul whispered in her head, quiet even though only she could hear him, _[if you upload me into the arcology’s systems, I can make a path out of here for you. Just don’t forget to pick me back up before you leave.]_

She could do that, she knew how to hack the console at the end of the hallway, she could—but what if he was playing her? What if he was just trying to get out of the doomed organic before the Garrote mercenaries killed her? What if he was going to leave her here to die?

As if he could hear her thoughts, and maybe he could, Jul said, _[Please, Bones. Trust me. We’re going to get out of here and we’re going to save your family.]_

Bones sucked in a shaky breath and pulled herself to her feet. “Alright. Let’s go.”


	5. And the Humvee is On Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> thus starts two straight chapters of violence. sorry this one is so late, friends.

Akili almost missed the first wave of mercenaries coming over the bridge, too distracted by Oracle. Ne broke into a run toward the closest wall and scaled the shear metal surface in seconds. Akili had never seen anything like it. _I’m so glad ne is on our side._

“Akili, look alive!” Pallas snapped, taking cover behind one of the chrome statues. Akili dove to join her there and saw Caalo and Centurion behind another a few yards to the right. A quick glance showed Oracle had scurried to a juncture between walls.

Ten mercenaries in dark brown armor stomped over the bridge and huddled in tight formation on the north end of the garden. They didn’t take any notice of the _Star Eater_ crew, but were unfortunately blocking the route back to the docking bay. Akili almost felt embarrassed for hitting the ground as fast as she had, if hostile contact wasn’t happening. Her HUD was one of the models that marked all armed unknowns as hostile on principle.

“You recognize these guys? We do anything to piss them off?” Pallas called over comm., sounding as confused as Akili felt.

“Garrote Solutions, looks like,” said Akili, “but I don’t think we’ve done anything to them lately. Maybe they’re not here for us?”

Caalo breathed out a sigh, and then sucked in a sharp breath: “Then who are they here for?”

Just then, the gate in the eastern wall opened and more Garrote mercenaries spilled out. In the middle of the fray was a screaming human woman with red hair. In one hand, she held a long, wicked knife. Sheathing the other was her omnitool, at least three programs running at once. Even the Garrotes around her seemed surprised to see her, doubly so when most of their guns began to overheat in their hands.

_[I told you to take the next right!]_ a voice blared over loudspeaker. _[The right!]_

“This is the right!” the woman shrieked back, having broken free of the cluster of armored bodies. Akili wasn’t sure how she’d done that, except maybe through the power of adrenaline, but she wasn’t safe yet. The group at the bridge were unfolding their guns.

_[It damn well—]_ the rest of the response cut out into garbled static.

“We believe that answers Creator-Caalo’Xaall’s question,” said Centurion.

“So, uh, are we on her side?” Caalo asked. Akili gave a sharp affirmative, too busy lining up her shot to say more. One civilian—in bloodstained, dirty clothes, at that—and unseen accomplice against upwards of twenty Garrotes? The decision was easy.

Her shotgun took out the head of the closest Garrote in the bridge group, not incidentally the one who’d taken aim first—she caught him just before he fired. The fleeing woman jumped at the sound, spinning on her heel. Pallas waved her over to their cover, then turned to focus her fire on the bridge group. The human stumbled behind a statue just in time for her pursuers by the east gate to regain use of their guns.

“Hey, I dunno if your friend knows this,” Akili said to the woman, dropping back into cover to switch thermal clips. Before she continued, Akili threw a singularity over her shoulder at the eastern group. “As I was saying, dunno if you know, but we have a ship in the docking bay, a little way past that bridge. If we can get through those assholes, we can get you to the Citadel, at least.”

 

Bones hesitated only a second before she said, “Sure. Better than here.”

The drell nodded at her and stood to keep firing. There was a fucking _geth platform_ behind the other statue, trading fire with the Garrotes Bones had fought her way through. It took a pistol round to the chestplate but barely twitched. One of the enemies got lucky and breached their cover, but the broad-shouldered quarian seized him by the neck hard enough to crack his armor and tossed him back the way he came. He hit the wall with a loud _thud_. The turian with the machinegun staggered from a concussive round and ducked back into cover to let her shields recharge. Without a second thought, these aliens had taken Bones in, even though it meant facing off against two dozen Garrotes.

Bones looked down at her omnitool, where Jul had left his programs open. They weren’t familiar to her, not the hacking programs she’d learned in dark bars during her teenage rebellious phase, but she could figure them out. She needed to help, this time, instead of just running.

_[The hallways beyond the bridge are clear,]_ Jul whispered through her omnitool as she worked. Why he’d shouted over the loudspeakers before, she didn’t know. Maybe to make himself seem more important. _[But there’s a contingent of Garrotes moving from GS headquarters toward the docking bay. I’ll try to slow them down as much as I can.]_

“Thanks.” Her fingers flew over hard light buttons, from one program to the next, and then—“Got it!”

Jul’s overheat hack, with a few tweaks, aimed toward the Garrotes holding the sector gate. It only landed on three of them, but the effect was near instantaneous. One minute, they were returning fire. The next, their guns malfunctioned, the thermal clips overheating and the firing chamber backing up in just the right way to cause a small-scale explosion. One Garrote went down, clutching the stump where his hand had been. The other two screamed as their guns turned into shrapnel.

_[How in the ancestors’ name did you do that?]_ Jul yelled, binaural through her omnitool and the loudspeakers. Bones shrugged, whipping that program away as it reset and pulling up the armor hack. The drell dropped behind the statue again to reload, and paused long enough to pat her on the shoulder.

 

“The lady’s weird friend says the path back to the ship is clear, but it won’t stay that way for long,” Akili said through team comm. Caalo gritted his teeth and aimed his rifle again.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” said Pallas over the rat-a-tat-tat of her machinegun, “but we only need to go over the bridge, right? We don’t need to go through that gate.”

“Right,” said Akili, in a sort of voice Caalo was beginning to dread. It was her planning voice. “ _Right_. Pallas, Caalo, switch places. Pallas, suppression fire on the gate. Caalo, you and I are going to make a path.”

“ _Keelah’selai_.” His stomach dropped into his shoes, but he sprinted to take Pallas’s position anyway. The human beside Akili popped up, tapped something on her omnitool, and hit the ground again. In the next second, two Garrotes in the bridge group froze like they’d been hit with a biotic stasis, sparks crawling over their armor. Akili took that as her cue to break cover, charging forward while firing from her shotgun. Caalo, with a sigh and a quick prayer, went after her.

His fist met a faceplate hard enough to shatter it and send shards into the man’s eyes. Caalo’s other hand dropped to break the man’s dominant wrist, preventing him from firing on them. Behind him, Akili used biotics to power up a kick straight between one’s legs, sending them tumbling through the air.

That was when the shock value wore off and the close-quarters gunfire began. Caalo managed to grab one of the immobilized men and use him as a shield, but in the fray another had gotten behind him. He felt the press of a pistol against his neck seals.

Then blinding light came down and his assailant’s head exploded. Oracle had, during the fight, crawled over to lurk three stories up above and to the right of the bridge. Ne sniped another man as Caalo watched, then had to abandon nir position due to return fire. Caalo couldn’t see where ne went after that, too distracted by his suddenly mobile hostage, but he could have sworn ne leapt froglike to the wall on the opposite side of the bridge.

One sharp twist snapped the man’s neck, then Caalo flung the body into a man firing on Akili.

That left five. At this gate.

Centurion approached, metal body pinging with bullet impact. Behind them, using their bulk as cover, was the human, who ducked out long enough to make someone’s gun explode. Centurion fired three shotgun rounds in rapid succession into the now-weaponless man’s chest. Further back, Pallas was walking backward, still firing her machinegun on the eastern group.

_[If you can get over the bridge, I can lock them in here,]_ the human’s friend said through their comm. channel. Akili cussed and swore she’d find out how he’d hacked it, but agreed.

Together, she and Caalo brought down another Garrote, and Oracle took out one more as ne landed beside Centurion. Ne took the human by the shoulder and hustled her across the bridge and behind the low fence. Centurion turned at the gate to give Pallas covering fire.

“Pallas, hurry up!” Akili shouted. She slammed her hand and a Warp into the fourth Garrote’s chest, and the fifth went down to a headshot from Oracle. Caalo joined Centurion in giving covering fire to Pallas, and she finally slung her machinegun over her shoulder and ran for it. She took some hits, one punching through her shields but thankfully not her armor, and slid over the bridge with Caalo and Centurion on her heels.

No sooner were they all through than an emergency mass effect field slammed down behind them, trapping their pursuers inside.

Caalo breathed a sigh of relief, and leant his weight against the guardrail. Well, the geth hadn’t shot him, but they were frighteningly effective in combat. _Good thing they’re on our side,_ he thought, patting Oracle on the shoulder in thanks.

_[Are those fucking geth?]_ he heard from the human’s omnitool, and she shushed it. _[No, no, no, what the fuck.]_

“They’re on my crew,” said Akili, who sounded more exhilarated than she had any right to be, after all that. “We’re Star Eater Requisitions. Speaking of.” She switched from outward speakers to internal and called their two team members still on the _Star Eater_. “Pilot, get the ship ready for launch. We’ve got hostiles moving in on the docking bay, and we’re coming in hot. Got a civilian with us.”

_“Oh by the Goddess.”_ Over the channel, Caalo heard a sound that might have been the pilot grinding their teeth.

“Thanks, babe.” She switched back to her outward speakers. “Follow me, ma’am. We’re getting you out of here. Do you know where your friend is, and how we can locate him for pickup if necessary?”

The human blinked, an expression Caalo recognized as human surprise. “He’s technically everywhere. Just let me get to a terminal connected to Nos Astra’s systems.” Caalo had far too much to deal with already to parse that.

Akili’s shoulder lifted and dropped, but by her tone, she wasn’t buying it: “Okay, sure. Let’s move. It’s a ten minute walk to the docking bay, let’s double-time it and pray we get there before our friends do.”


	6. And You're On Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wowza it has been ten thousand years since my last update, my sincere apologies /sweatdrop emoji. some content warnings for more violence and possibly unsettling descriptions of injuries.

Of course it couldn’t be easy. By Akili’s count, they were only one hallway away from the docking bay when the Garrotes caught up to them. Well, if it could be called “caught up” when their enemies rounded the corner just ahead of them, rather than coming up from behind.

At the first sight of brown and red armor, Akili shoved Bones behind Centurion. The hallway had a good amount of cover in the form of doorways, half-walls, and displays, but it wasn’t an ideal spot for a shootout.

“Heads down and keep walking,” she hissed. “We might be able to get around them.”

“We calculate a twenty-seven percent chance of escaping notice,” supplied Oracle. Ne cocked nir head to the side and reevaluated. “Fifteen perfect chance of avoiding violence, unless we are willing to sacrifice the human. Our calculations indicate that is very unlikely.”

Bones didn’t appear to have heard, hunkered down behind Centurion and snarling at her omnitool. “I thought you said you’d hold them off.”

_[I can lock doors; I can’t keep people from cutting through them.]_

They were almost past the Garrotes when their luck ran out. One of the mercenaries happened to glance up at the right moment to catch Bones peeking around Centurion, and opened fire. Akili cursed and slammed down a stasis, but not before a round burned across Bones’ shoulder. It was a close-quarters fight, all of them too near each other in the hallway. Akili usually didn’t mind, but with an unarmored civilian to protect, it was too much of a risk. At the very least, they were between the Garrotes and the door to the docking bay rather than the other way around.

She had her shotgun out and chewed down one Garrote’s shields before the stasis wore off. Centurion hadn’t moved except to draw their own shotgun, though their aim was compromised; they had one arm swung back to keep Bones behind them and out of the line of fire.

“Get to cover, dammit,” Akili snapped at them. Centurion’s shields were good, but not that good, and none of them wanted to try putting a geth back together. Oracle had already bounced to the ceiling, where ne was taking headshots and bringing down shields. Akili couldn’t tell how many Garrotes there were, and at this point she didn’t care.

Pallas read Akili’s intentions and laid down suppression fire while walking backwards. “Centurion, Caalo, move back,” Pallas said, jerking her head to a display further down the hall. Caalo and Centurion used their shields and bulk to keep Bones covered as they hustled. Bones’ hand came out, once, to lock down a Garrote’s armor and tear down his shields. Akili and Oracle moved to dispatch him, Oracle’s sniper beam getting there first, Akili’s bullets colliding with the already-falling body. _The perils of working with new people,_ she thought, wry. _Pallas never steals my kills._

Akili threw down a singularity and booked it down the hall, one hand out to hook Pallas at the elbow and drag her along.

“Hey!”

“I’m not waiting for your slow ass, Pallas.” She cast a glance at her HUD. The singularity had hit right in the center of the group. It threw off enough of them that Centurion, Caalo, and Oracle could shoot down the rest with ease. Oracle scurried along the ceiling over Akili’s head, keeping pace even as ne took careful aim and drilled a hole through one Garrote’s chest armor.

There. She sighed as they all made it behind the huge advertisement display. They were only a few yards from the gate into the docking bay. She commed the ship: “Pilot, we’re coming in real fucking hot, here.”

Over the sound of gunfire, pilot yelled back, _“Who did you piss off?”_

“Uh, Garrote Solutions.” She paused to hit their pursuers with another singularity. “They’re at the ship? Are you shitting me? They shouldn’t know who we are!” Garrote Solutions was notoriously bad at the intelligence side of the private contracting business. Their wetworks division, which to most people only existed in whispered rumors, had intel to put the Citadel to shame, but word had it that interdepartmental rivalries were getting worse, so the mercenary division was usually less informed than it should be. Wetworks might even be considering seceding from the company. Maybe that was why _Star Eater_ was dealing with the mercenaries and messy urban combat, instead of the trained assassins and poison in the night.

Bones ducked under Centurion’s arm and hit the Garrotes with another weapons overload. When she came back into cover, another bullet furrow burnt across her upper arm, she said, “They’ve made significant changes to their intel division.” She was hiding something, but Akili could let it slide for now.

“Alright.” She came up long enough to empty her clip into someone, then hit the floor again. Pallas was standing, like always, no respect for the danger. “Alright. Bones, can your friend lock the gate behind us?”

“He should be able to.”

_[But if they bring out the plasma cutters again, there’s not much I can do,]_ the voice came directly into her helmet’s internal speakers, and Amonkira guide her, she was going to figure out how he did that. _[I could trigger a red alert, but that would lock everything down and you wouldn’t be able to get your ship out of here.]_

“Okay, yeah, don’t do that. Everyone, through the gate on three, be ready for hostiles on the other side.” She counted up at a steady pace, on _three_ pushing Pallas through ahead of her. Otherwise, the turian might have tried to cover their backs, or something. Oracle was the first through, with Bones and Akili as the last. They put their backs to the gate as soon as it closed.

 

Behind Caalo, the human’s omnitool hissed, _[Don’t forget to pick me back up.]_

“I know, Jul,” she said back, tone distracted. It wasn’t hard to spot the _Star Eater,_ with three Garrotes trying to breach the secondary airlocks. The ramp of the main airlock was only a quarter of the way down, BB laying prone on it a good fifteen feet above the docking bay floor, with a sniper rifle and a pile of grenades. He seemed to prefer the grenades, especially against the twenty-odd other Garrotes spread across the bay. At least none of the Garrotes had taken notice of them yet.

“Uh, this doesn’t seem any better than what we left behind,” Caalo said.

“Sure it is,” said Akili. “We have an escape route. We just need to get to the ship. Between the pilot and me, we can biotic lift anyone who can’t jump to the ramp. Pallas, think you can make it?”

“Sure, and I can probably bring Bones with me.” Bones didn’t look too thrilled, if Caalo was reading human facial expression right, but she gave a sharp nod.

“I need to access that terminal first,” she said, pointing down to one a few yards away. Still a defensible position, at least, with a support structure protruding from the wall beside it. “I can’t abandon Jul.”

Akili’s head turned first to Pallas and then to Caalo, like she was asking their opinion. After a few seconds, she shrugged. “Sure, alright. Centurion, keep covering her. The rest of us, we’re gonna help BB clear the area. We need as few people shooting us as possible for this to work.”

“So you want to get their attention first?” Pallas asked dryly, but hefted her machinegun into ready position.

His attention split between Akili and the Garrotes who still hadn’t spotted them, Caalo saw Akili give a loose, languid shrug. “Yeah, of course.”

“Keelah’selai,” he said, half an exclamation of fear and half to fortify himself. He was standing here, with two geth platforms and the scariest drell in the galaxy, and Cerberus had made him a tool of war. He could do this, though he might shit himself in the process. Akili nodded at him, then at Pallas, then Oracle. Pallas nodded back and motioned with her gun toward a stack of steel crates ten yards from the terminal Bones would be using. From the crates, they’d have a straight shot to the _Star Eater_ when the time came—though it was a long, open stretch that could easily turn into a shooting gallery.

Pallas and Akili moved first, yelling and shooting, drawing attention to themselves as Bones and Centurion moved for the terminal. It worked, but what worked better was the sudden biotic slam that sent half the Garrotes, including the three trying to break down the lower airlock, into the walls. Caalo glanced up and, yes, there next to BB was the pilot, furious and glowing with power.

Caalo went next with his rifle, one shot after another and one step at a time until he was behind the crates. Oracle stayed behind, lurking high on the wall to provide Bones and Centurion extra protection. They didn’t need it, not quite yet, as the Garrotes were more focused on the active attackers than the pair at the terminal. Caalo kept shooting, an eye on his shield levels. Garrote Solutions really didn’t have the best tech in the galaxy, or at least their average grunts didn’t. It didn’t take him long to punch through shields and then armor. Next to him, Akili threw stasis and warps, and blasted heads off with her shotgun. Her shoulders were twitching the same way they had been back in the garden, though, just before she’d dragged him into a melee confrontation.

“Whatever you’re planning, make it quick,” the pilot snapped through the comm. They tossed a singularity that swallowed five Garrotes, and BB sent a grenade right into its gravitational pull. _Messy_ , Caalo thought distantly, but at least they’d whittled the field down to fourteen. He wondered, as he lined up his next shot, when the numbers would be low enough for Akili to call the retreat.

 

It was taking Bones a lot longer to download Jul back into…herself, basically, than it had taken to upload him onto Nos Astra’s systems. The gunfire didn’t help, nor the fear that a stray bullet would hit the terminal. She didn’t know what that would do to Jul, if the terminal was destroyed when he’d only half-downloaded. Would there be two full Juls, or two half-Juls? Maybe it would just kill him.

But while he downloaded, she couldn’t use her omnitool for anything else. She still had her steak knife, by some miracle, but that wouldn’t do her any good here. At least the two geth were with her, and wasn’t that a strange thought. The bulky one kept using their body to shield her from incoming fire, so Bones was very quickly getting over any nervousness she had about them.

A biotic slam sent a Garrote into the wall right next to her. She jumped, and readied for an attack, but his neck had broken on impact. The gunfire and grenade blasts were loud behind her. This was taking too long. Bones tried all the tricks she knew to speed up a download, her hands flying across the terminal keyboard and her omnitool. She just needed to shave it down by seconds at a time, it would add up, everything would be fine—

Bones didn’t notice the incendiary round until the smell of burning hit her nose. Oh, thank god, it was her left hand and not the terminal. The round had burnt away her skin and her hand’s few organic components, exposing the metal and synth-muscle beneath. Her organic nerve endings died before they could register the pain, and her cybernetic ones were delayed—ah, there it was. She couldn’t keep in the cry or the curse, and saw Centurion turn toward her.

“Friend Bones,” they started to say, but the Garrotes took the opening to tear down Centurion’s shields. Bullets impacted onto their armor, leaving scrapes and scorch-marks.

“It’s just skin!” she yelled, as much for her benefit as theirs. “It’s just skin, I’m fine, focus on the fighters.” That was, of course, when more bullets started hitting the wall around her, and she flung her injured hand out in a reflexive _stop it_ motion. Something exploded, maybe a gun, but she didn’t have time to think about it. Jul was almost done. She counted down the seconds, five, four, three, two, one—

“It’s done!” she yelled to Akili. The drell took a moment to respond, preoccupied with choking out a Garrote who’d gotten too close to her for his own good.

“Alright! Everybody get ready!” For Pallas, that meant jogging back to Centurion and Bones’ position and, with a _hope you don’t mind,_ hefting Bones up over one strong shoulder. Not ideal, in Bones’ opinion, but she didn’t get to voice this before Akili shouted, “Go!”

Pallas took off running, faster than Bones expected, with Oracle sprinting along behind. The Garrotes didn’t stop shooting, and neither did the Star Eater team. Bones did her part, locking armor and overloading guns. Then, all of a sudden, Pallas _leapt_ , clearing the fifteen feet between the ground and the ship’s ramp just barely. Bones resisted the urge to puke or to scream as Pallas dangled by one hand from the edge of the ramp.

“Chill out,” the turian said, as Oracle landed on the ramp and helped to haul them up. “We’re fine.”

Next to them, Centurion floated up on a wave of blue light. Bones had just gotten onto the ramp when Akili sailed over her head to land in a graceless roll. She popped up into a crouch and made a motion with her arms, biotic power rolling down them, and seconds later Caalo landed on the ramp and stumbled to the airlock.

“Everybody in!” the asari called, as they turned on their heel and disappeared into the ship. It was a mess of limbs and guns through the door, but they all got inside.

The _Star Eater_ lifted off, and they were away.

**Author's Note:**

> For those wondering: The asari pilot is me attempting to write a character who refuses to be named and refuses to be gendered, so. Quarian physiology is a mix of what we see of Tali in ME3, some influences from other fic (esp. Spirit of Redemption, don't look at me), and some of my own ideas because why not.  
> Please feel free to point out any mistakes wrt the Mass Effect universe.


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